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Loblaw Companies didn’t, however, make any offer to settle Chris Delaney and Amanda House’s complaints.

The founders of YoPro Treats are locked in a bitter struggle with Loblaw Companies after the grocery giant agreed to carry their frozen yogurt treat, but then never got it on the shelves of most stores because of a series of administrative errors.

Company chair Galen Weston met with House and Delaney on Dec. 14 after House posted an emotional video to YouTube pleading with Weston to “do the right thing” for her company. The local couple, Weston and their respective lawyers spent more than an hour together.

In a formal statement released after the meeting Loblaw stood by its argument it did all it could to support a new product that just didn’t sell.

“We acknowledge that mistakes were made. However in the overall context, these were outweighed by the significant effort made by colleagues to support the sale of YoPro in hundreds of the company’s stores in Ontario and Quebec for more than a year,” Loblaw said. “Unfortunately for both parties, the product simply didn’t sell well.”

The company also specifically rejected claims by House and Delaney that as soon as their patents expired Loblaw released a copycat product under its President’s Choice label.

“YoPro’s claim that we misappropriated the recipe or process for the manufacturing of their product is completely without merit,” the statement said. “The manufacturer of Loblaw’s PC Greek yogurt is using the same process to make bars for the Company that it has used since the late 1990s — years before YoPro was introduced to Loblaw. The recipe itself was inspired by a House and Home magazine article published in 2010.”

House and Delaney are suing Loblaw Companies for $20 million. The copycat product allegation is contained in a statement of claim and has not yet been tested in court.

Loblaw’s e-mailed statement caught House by surprise — some of the points it raised weren’t part of the discussion she and Delaney had with Weston.

“I’m a little surprised because some of that wasn’t brought up in the meeting,” she said after being read the text of the company statement. “Right after the meeting I was hopeful that at least the lines of communication were open, but I’m less hopeful now after hearing this.”

At the conclusion of their discussion, House said Weston promised to “investigate” the situation further and get back to them next week.

“So we continue to wait, but then we’ve been waiting for five years,” she said.

House and her fiancé, Chris Delaney, have been in a David-and-Goliath battle with Loblaw since 2008 when the grocery chain agreed to stock YoPro in 269 stores. The product was never included on the approved list for stores, leaving the Burlington couple with more than $1 million invested in development and production and no way to sell their product.

After two years of struggles with the company, they sued in 2010 but have been locked since then in a cycle of procedural motions and other delaying actions.

After seeing the video — which was viewed more than 181,400 times — Weston released a statement saying the allegations against his company “are deeply disturbing and do not in any way meet the high ethical standards aspired to by Loblaw Companies and outlined in its code of conduct.”

The video was posted shortly after Delaney collapsed and was rushed to hospital, struck down by the combined effects of pain and sleeping medications, according to House.

In her video, House holds a tablet in front of her webcam showing Delaney in a hospital bed connected to a respirator and tells Weston “He hasn’t slept since your company turned our lives upside down. It was the scariest moment of my life, Mr. Weston, watching him fade in and out of consciousness, not understanding what was going on and gasping for air.

“What will it take, Mr. Weston?” she added. “When is your company going to stand up and do the right thing and make these things right?”

House and Delaney conceived the idea for YoPro after meeting at a Burlington gym in 2004. His dreams of a career as a firefighter or professional football player were crushed in 1993 when he learned he was going blind from a degenerative eye disease. She had trained as a kinesiologist and was working in physiotherapy.

For two years, they poured every penny they had saved or could borrow into developing a probiotic frozen yogurt treat. There were initial contracts with small chains such as Longo’s, where it sold well. In January 2008, they hit what they thought was the jackpot for new food products when Loblaw agreed to stock YoPro.